Sartre's Sexism Reconsidered

CONSTANCE MUI
Loyola University
In 1973, Margery Collins and Christine Pierce became the first critics
to take issue with Sartre's philosophy on charges of blatant sexism. Their
article, entitled "Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis," has
been reprinted in many reputable anthologies on women, gaining
considerable recognition in the feminist community. Michele le Doeuff,
for example, reinforced its thesis by extending it to her own unfavorable
reevaluation of Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy, which is founded on
Sartre's ontology. Interestingly, whether it is due to indifference or
uncritical acceptance, for some fifteen years since the article, Collins and
Pierce have not received any public response from the Sartrean
community. This rather long and unexpected silence means that they
have put in the first and last word on an important and timely subject
which deserves an open dialogue. Indeed, because of the value of Sartrean
ontology for important feminist writings such as The Second Sex, it is time
to reassess the authors' thesis so as to generate some much needed
discussion on the issue.
To be sure, Collins and Pierce are on the right track in pointing out the
unmistakably sexist language in Sartre's discussions of the slimy and the
hole, which he associates with the breast and the vagina, organs that are
distinctively female. What clearly comes through in the analogies is the
utter repugnance that Sartre feels toward the female body-for-others (i.e.,
the female body as an object). There is no question that behind the
unapologically sexist language lies a grumbling misogynist. The more
fundamental question, however, is whether his personal distaste for
woman negatively affects the position of woman in his overall ontology.
Such an inquiry will shed some light on whether we should reject the
philosophy, and not just the philosopher, as sexist and hence defective.
2

*I am indebted to Richard Schmitt and Richard Westley for their helpful

comments.
Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, "Holes and Slime: Sexism in
Sartre's Psychoanalysis," Philosophical Forum (v. V, Fall-Win., 1973), pp.
112-127. For woman's anthologies, see, for example, Women in Western
Thought, ed. by Martha Lee Osborne (New York: Random House, 1979),
and Woman and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, ed. by Carol
Gould & Marx Wartofsky (New York: Putnam Press, 1976).
Michele le Doeuff, "Operative Philosophy: Simone de Bearvoir and
Existentialism," in Ideology & Consciousness, no.6. Autumn 1979, pp. 47-58.
2

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This paper will argue that Sartre, in spite of himself, has set up a
system which ironically committed him to giving woman an at least equal,
if not more primordial, ontological status as man. This argument seeks to
qualify Collins* and Pierce's original thesis by situating it within the
broader context of Sartrean ontology. One cannot infer from the sexist
analogies of slime and holes the claim that woman occupies an inferior
ontological status. To do so would be to overlook the delightful irony in his
ontology: in spite of his ill feelings toward woman, woman nevertheless
prevails as a full-fledged consciousness in that ontology.
Collins and Pierce were careful to identify sexism only in Sartre's
psychoanalysis. They charged that
Sartre's existential psychoanalysis... offer(s) instances in which the Initself is associated with distinctly feminine, or female, qualities,
thereby implying that a typical female nature does exist and function.
Moreover, this female essence is invested with an utterly negative
value, making Sartre guilty of blatant sexism.
4

However, like everything in Being and Nothingness, Sartre's

psychoanalysis is itself an integral component of his general ontology and
can not be understood apart from it. This means his psychology must be
seen in terms of the distinctive characteristics of pour-soi and en-soi, as
well as the peculiar relation between them. The most characteristic
feature of pour-soi is consciousness. Consciousness is not some kind of
substance but a "nothingness", a pure flux. It is empty qua itself, but
becomes a consciousness-of-something by throwing itself toward some
thing-out-there. The thing-out-there, the thing which fills consciousness
and gives it its content, is en-soi. En-soi can be any inanimate object, but it
can also be another consciousness whose body is captured as an object in
the eyes of the subject.
Clearly, then, in Sartrean ontology consciousness approaches every
entity in the world, even other subjects, in a subject-to-object relation. The
bond between pour-soi (subject) and en-soi (object) is a delicate one. As
consciousness, 1 experience the world through a relation which turns
everything around me, including other consciousness, into a passive unity
of objects. But by the same token, I am quite dependent and vulnerable to
these objects in so far as consciousness demands as its very support their
being-there. It is through their objectification that my existence as
Collins and Pierce, p. 117. The authors have also identified sexism in
Sartre's literary writings, claiming that the sexism in his psychology is
reflected in those writings. This paper will only address the sexism in
Sartre's psychoanalysis, with the understanding that our interpretation of
his literary writings will vary according to our interpretation of his
philosophy.
4

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33

consclousness-of-something is sustained.
Furthermore, because consciousness, as pure nothingness, Is
thoroughly translucent, pour-soi is in no position to posit the being of the
substantial object of which it is conscious. Hence, the object must exist, as
brute being, independent of and prior to its encounter with consciousness.
It must have been already-there before the burst of consciousness onto it,
objectifying it in the process. But for the same reason that consciousness
cannot found the being of its objects, pour-soi desires being. It seeks to
escape from Its own nothingness and contingency by acquiring, without
compromising its own consciousness, the substantiality and full positivity
of en-soi. In short, it seeks in vain to preserve within itself the opposing
characteristics of both pour-soi and en-soi, viz., God.
Even though this fundamental desire can never be fulfilled, pour-soi
nevertheless engages in patterns of bad faith by acting in ways that
symbolically place itself as the foundation of en-soi. A common pattern is
appropriation, in which I attempt to completely possess the object so that
it may become a part of me. Possession is therefore symbolic of the
impossible union of pour-soi and en-soi. It is through this fundamental
choice of being God that pour-sol identifies with the absolute positivity of
en-soi and deceptively justifies its existence as the source of en-sol. In
view of this choice, the primary relation between pour-soi and en-soi is one
of appropriation.
This subject-to-object relation of appropriation provides the
indispensable ontological context in which to assess both Sartre's
psychoanalysis and Collins' and Pierce's critique of it. For Sartre, the aim
of psychoanalysis is to comprehend the truth of human behavior by
analyzing the person's particular choice of being. Every behavior, every
action, presupposes a concrete choice. Such everyday choices, says Sartre,
often manifest the person's fundamental desire "to have", which amounts
to a hopeless project to be God.
This fundamental desire to appropriate objects is reflected not only in
our actions but also in our "gut feelings" toward things. Our attitude
toward a given object-e.g., whether we feel exhilaration or disgustdepends on whether or not it exhibits for us any possessable quality.
Sartre notes that the things we find most revolting are those that offer the
strongest resistance toward us. Such are objects with a "slimy" quality.
6

In so far as the qualities found in the object is transcendent to pour-soi,

there is, for Sartre, an "invitational" element found in each thing, which
draws us to it and affects the way we feel about it. This mitigates the
subjective aspect of perception. For Sartre, the existential (as opposed to
empirical) psychoanalyst must accept an ontological starting point with
respect to the objective characteristics in objects. This must be taken into
consideration in her evaluation of the subjective meanings that those
characteristics have for the subject.
6

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It is in Sartre's discussion of the slimy that Collins and Pierce

documented the first instance of sexism. Sartre points out that objects
come in three general states: liquid, solid, and the ambiguous quality in
between, slime. Liquid and solid things are ideal objects of possession.
Water, for example, gives me the kind of satisfaction that comes with the
appropriation of knowledge. As consciousness, I can internalize
knowledge without compromising its objective character as truth. Like
consciousness, water has the clarity to reveal something without changing
its actual identity. On the other hand, solid things, such as a rock, have the
compelling opacity which secure them as unevasive, accessible objects.
The rock's concreteness allows me to modify it at will, making it
identifiable both subjectively and objectively as my thing. But none of this
can be said of slimy objects. To use Sartre's example of honey, when I dip
my finger into a jar of honey, it clings to me and slowly slides down my
finger like a snake. And when I try to squeeze it as though it were a rock, it
oozes out like worms between my fingers. Collins and Pierce cited Sartre's
description of this feeling of repugnance and submitted it as evidence of
sexism:
The For-itself is suddenly compromised ...I want to let go of the slimy
and it sticks to me...it sucks at me...a moist and feminine sucking...I
cannot slide on this slime..it is a rrap..i>lime is the revenge of the Initself. A sickly-sweet feminine revenge which may be symbolized...by
the quality sugary...symbollzing the sugary death of the For-itself.
6

Collins and Pierce noted that "the sugary" thus "poses an ultimate threat"
to pour-soi, one of nihilation or nothingness. What emerges from Sartre's
description, they charged,
is a traditional concept of the feminine, a sweet, clinging, dependent
threat to male freedom. Like... Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Sartre
identifies his concept of femininity with female and rails against these
qualities in women as if they were natural characteristics, evidence of
a given nature.
7

In other words, Sartre is guilty of sexism on grounds that he 1) employs the

traditional concept of femininity as sweet, clinging, dependent, etc.; 2)
identifies this traditional concept of femininity with the female, making no
distinction between the two; and 3) assumes that the feminine and
therefore female qualities are natural characteristics indicative of a predetermined female nature. With all due respect to the authors, these
inferences cry out for substantiation both textual and theoretical. A
Collins and Pierce, p. 117.
Ibid.
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consideration of some relevant points will bring out the difficulties in each
of them.
Regarding the first inference, we must, to be fair to Sartre, bear in
mind that in the passage cited, he is referring to honey as an example of
the slimy. Hence, it is the honey, not the feminine, that is described as
sugary, sweet, clinging, soft and sticky. Twice Sartre interjects the word
'feminine' to specify that it is a stickiness and a sickly-sweetness of the
feminine kind. This makes the reverse of Collins'and Pierce's first
inference more plausible: Sartre is not defining the feminine in a
traditional manner as soft, sweet, clinging, etc., but the soft, sweet, and
clinging as feminine. This juxtaposition makes it clear that Sartre has not
committed himself to any universal claim about femininity itself. Notice
that we are not merely fussing with semantics here. If I say that apples are
red, I am making no universal claim about redness, only about apples. I
have not said anything about redness that could be taken to apply to all
things red. Similarly, Sartre's description of softness as feminine follows
the same linguistic and logical principle. There, whatever is implied about
the feminine can in no way be applied universally, such that femininity is
necessarily clinging and soft, which, for Sartre, amounts to being slimy and
repugnant. The fallacy of such application can be detected more
poignantly if we turn Sartre's description into an argument form:
8

1.
2.
3.
4.

(All) soft, clinging things are (some) feminine.

Soft, clinging things are slimy.
Slimy things are repugnant.
Therefore, feminine things are repugnant.

Evidently, this argument amounts to a fallacy of the excluded middle In

his description of the Slimy, Sartre is committed only to the three
premises, but not the invalid conclusion, which incidentally would make
Sartre "anti-feminine".
This certainly raises some serious questions about Collins' and
Pierce's overall thesis (see p. 2). Specifically, if it is logically invalid to infer
from Sartre's discussion that thefeminineis repugnant, it is not clear as to
how Sartre can be guilty of "blatant sexism" for assigning a "negative
value" (of repugnance) to the "distinctively feminine". Indeed, the thesis
could not have been rescued even if we drop the universals from the
The first 'feminine' describes "the stickiness which sucks at me"this
stickiness amounts to a "feminine sucking" according to Sartre. The
second 'feminine' describes the "sickly-sweet revenge": we are told that it
is a sickly-sweetness of the feminine kind. Furthermore, 'sweet' and
'sugary' are words that are particularly descriptive of honey rather than the
slimy. Sartre's second example of glue as slimy makes this point clear
(Being and Nothingness, p. 610).
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argument above to yield the conclusion, "some feminine things (e.g.,

honey) are slimy and repugnant". If only some but not all feminine things
are slimy, then surely it is not the feminine quality itself which makes those
things slimy, since the qualifier 'some' already suggests that there can be
other feminine things which are not slimy and repugnant.
But suppose Sartre really considers the feminine as slimy and
repugnant, Collins and Pierce would readily acknowledge that this would
only make Sartre anti-feminine, but not necessarily anti-female. This
calls into question their second inference, which asserts that Sartre
identifies his negative concept of femininity with the female. In the
absence of textual evidence, it remains to be substantiated theoretically
that Sartre has in fact passed from the feminine to the female. But
nothing in his system would justify such a move, since it is a system which
has consistnetly denounced the idea of a fixed human nature. For Sartre,
being feminine does not and indeed cannot amount to being female
because the person's femininity or masculinity is a choice which is not
determined by her gender or anything else. In so far as there Is no
necessary connection between gender and behavior in Sartre's system, he
cannot be accused of being anti-female even if he is anti-feminine.
Furthermore, not every anti-feminine view is sexist. In a patriarchal
society, many traditional feminine traits, including 'soft' and 'clinging', are
in fact repugnant because they reinforce a woman's submissiveness and
dependence. And so Sartre cannot be labelled a sexist any more than the
feminist who finds those same feminine traits repugnant can be labelled a
sexist.
Similarly, the third inference fails for lack of textual and theoretical
support, even if we assume that Sartre is anti-female for the reasons
Collins and Pierce indicated. At this point the authors promptly sought to
strengthen their claim concerning the woman's "fixed nature" with
evidence taken from Sartre's discussion of holes. In that discussion, they
argued,
9

The authors acknowledged the important distinction between feminine

and female in a footnote (p. 126, fn. 15). They maintained, however, that in
order to escape the charge of sexism, Sartre needs to make the distinction
clear. And since he has not done so, he is therefore guilty of sexism. But
this is hardly convincing given all the obscure and rambling passages
throughout Being and Nothingness. His failure to make the distinction in
question is probably not deliberate, and there are many other distinctions
which he should have made, such as his multiple usage of the concept
"being". All told, whereas we may have enough evidence to fault him for
being ambiguous and sloppy here, there does not seem to be sufficient
evidence to fault him for sexism.
8

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it becomes clear that it is not culturally acquired or chosen qualities,

but the actual female anatomy which constitutes the threatening Initself. Here, the translation "feminine sexual organ" undoubtedly
denotes female...In...(Sartre's) remarks on sexual organs only the
female is labelled obscene.
10

And so the authors concluded that, for Sartre, it is a woman's "given

nature" to be soft, threatening, and obscene, since she does not choose but
is born with a female body with those negative qualities. But if this is all it
takes to conclude that woman Is assigned a fixed nature in Sartre's system,
what is to keep us from exonerating Sartre from charges of sexism by
applying this theory to man, who, like woman, is also born with a body not
of his own choosing? Would not man also have a fixed nature, perhaps a
less obscene one, by virtue of having a body? Since in Sartre's ontology,
any entity with a fixed nature is en-soi, what difference does it make
ontologlcally if the man is en-soi of the "positive" sort and the woman
"negative"? En-soi is en-soi! Indeed, this allegation of sexism amounts to a
superficial reading of Sartre, since It assumes, as conventional language
might allow, that whatever is "natural" to our being, such as our anatomy,
must be "evidence of a given nature". It fails to take into account 1) the
distinction Sartre makes among the different ontological dimensions of
the body, and the particular relation between the self and each of these
dimensions; 2) the fact that, In the discussions of holes, Sartre is giving a
limited and very subjective account of the female body in one of its three
ontological dimensions as being-an-object-for-others; and 3) on one level,
all bodies, in so far as they are that through which the Other can have a
hold on our being, are threatening and obscene as far as Sartre is
concerned.
Apparently, Sartre does not deny that we have a material body subject
to physical laws, a body-fbr-others that is viewed objectively and often
negatively by the Other. However, what he does deny is the claim that our
body-fbr-others is the only condition of our embodiment. He has taken
pains to rescue us from determinism by accentuating a more fundamental
dimension of our body, the "body-for-itself', whereby I engage in the ideal
relation with my body by "living" it. In this relation, I experience no psychic
distance between myself and my body, the kind found in any subject-toobject relation. And so the most authentic relation 1 can have with my
body is not one in which I objectify my own body before the Other, or
Identify with the Other's objectification of my body. In light of this
distinction between body-for-me and body-for-others, it seems rather
irrelevant in our evaluation of Sartre's system what Sartre or anyone else
has to say about the woman's body-for-others. That is because it is nothing
more than an account of how the woman appears to Sartre, the woman's
Collins and Pierce, pp. 117-118.

10

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body-as-viewed-subjectively-by-Sartre. Here, Sartre would be the first to

state the obvious: it could in no way be understood as constituting the
woman's identity orfixednature.
This discussion brings out the problems facing each of Collins* and
Pierce's three inferences, problems which clearly undermine specific
charges of sexism they leveled against Sartrean psychoanalysis. All told, if
Sartre is sexist, it is not for the reasons the authors gave; and if there is
sexism in his philosophy, it is not in the passages they cited as evidence.
This of course does not automatically make Sartre less of a sexist, it only
shows that Collins and Pierce have misfired. No doubt we are offended by
Sartre's demeaning remarks about woman. Rather than making excuses
for him, Collins and Pierce deserve credit for putting him on the defensive.
In doing so they have made us all the more cautious about traditional
philosophy, since even the most zealous philosopher of human freedom is
himself a slave to sexual biases. But if we are to seize this opportunity to
reform a discipline so deeply ingrained in sexism, we had better make
ourselves credible by giving a well-founded, accurate account of Sartre's
sexism-one that would promise a conviction without doing him an
injustice.
Now any accurate account would require that we stay close to the text.
In the analysis of the slimy Sartre's only reference to the woman appears
in one of his examples, and it involves not her complete being but only a
part of her anatomy: her breasts. In the analysis of holes, he again refers
not to the woman as a person but only to her partial anatomy, this time her
vagina, which he offers as an example of holes. Hence these two
references show the consistency in Sartre's sexist treatment of woman. He
points to specific female organs, as derogatorily as he himself would see
them, as examples to illuminate his ideas of the slimy and holes. In both
cases, there is little doubt that the examples reflect a very dark side of the
philosopher himself. But they also allow us to separate the philosopher
from his philosophy on an important issue: namely, that his sexism is not
contained in the ideas themselves but is channeled into the examples
used to illustrate those ideas. Here, we must ask the questions, need those
examples be the ones Sartre chose, or will the theory work just as well with
other examples? In other words, are those specific examples indispensible
to the theory itself? The answer to both questions, in both cases, is no.
Considerfirstthe slimy. In his description Sartre says,
(when) the slimy collapse(s)...(it) appears at once as a deflation..and as
display-like the flattening out of the full breasts of a woman who is
lying on her back.
11

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans, by Hazel E. Barnes (New

York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 608.
11

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What immediately comes to mind is that the woman's breasts are neither
the most obvious nor the most appropriate example of slimy substances.
If the slimy is that ambiguous quality between water and solid, and if it
represents a threat to consciousness much like the Other's body is a
threat, then what can be a better example than the semen produced by
man's body? Indeed, semen captures the slimy most symbolically: like
consciousness, it bursts out in an explosion onto its object, but at the same
time it represents en-soi by negating the very essence of consciousness as
absolute lucidity. By avoiding this very obvious example Sartre is anything
but objective, since objectivity would require that he employs this example
for its effectiveness regardless of his own disposition.
In the analysis of holes, we see that, like the slimy, holes also offer a
strong resistance to our fundamental project of appropriation. When we
attempt to possess it by plugging it up, it devours us-we lose ourselves in it
and become its object. To illustrate the horror in our confrontation with
holes, Sartre refers to the vagina, corresponding obviously to heterosexual
intercourse whereby the man is the subject and the woman the object of
such horror. But this amounts to a male-oriented, hetero-centric account
of consciousness and its ontological fear of holes, which does not exhaust
the whole panorama of human sexual experience, both female and male,
homosexual and heterosexual. For instance, there are sexual acts in which
the object plugged up is not the female vagina but the anus or the mouth
of either sex.
These considerations show that, in both cases, an example of the male
anatomy taken from a female perspective should have been used Instead
of or in addition to the ones Sartre employed. Far from being
Indispensible, the sexist examples in Sartre's psychoanalysis are not even
the most representative or effective ones that could be used. Sartre has
chosen those examples for at least two reasons: his subjective repulsion
toward woman, and the traditional male model adopted throughout his
discussion. This model of the healthy, privileged adult male has been
used uncritically and often unconsciously in the history of thought. And so
it is not surprising that, in a male-centered analysis of appropriation,
woman would be associated with the appropriated object, i.e., the slimy
and holes.
Here the question arises as to how this traditional male model might
affect woman's status in an ontology that isfoundedon the Cartesian split
between subject and object. Is woman forever locked into the position of
object/Other? The unacceptable implication of this position, Collins and
Pierce cautioned us, is that woman "becomes...the personification of the
In-itselF. Michele le Doeuff argues further that Sartre
12

12

Collins and Pierce, p. 119.

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founds an ontological hierarchy, on the basis of which, for all eternity,

woman can be posited as the in-itself and man as for-itself. The ...
roles deduced from this phenomenology place woman outside the
subject..
13

But these assessments are premature. First, the fact that woman is
consistently treated as the object does not entail that she is in fact an
object. The status of woman in the traditional male model is simply that of
pour-soi becoming the being who is looked at in the mode of en-soi. All it
takes to reverse this (male) subject-to-(female) object relation is a shift in
our vantage point from the masculine to the feminine. Second, there
cannot be a gender hierarchy in Sartrean ontology because, even as the
object/Other, woman must nonetheless be a conscious pour-soi given
Sartre's important revision of the traditional theory of intersubjectivity.
The tradition has long insisted on the primacy of the subject-to-object
relation whereby the subject becomes aware of the Other through the
Other's body. Sartre criticized this position for failing to uncover an even
more primary relation: my subject-to-object relation to the Other is itself
founded on the Other's turning me into an object through her "look". In
other words, my making an object of the Other lies subsequent to her
making an object of me (or my awareness that she could have made an
object of me). I become aware of the Other not through her body, but my
own awareness that / have a body which is being looked-at.
Not surprisingly, Sartre analyzes this phenomenon of the look in
terms of pour-soi's fundamental project of appropriation. He maintains
that the look represents a threat to consciousness in that it immediately
makes me aware of two simultaneous conditions: 1) there is a dimension
of my being that is "out there" and in danger of being captured, in short a
"being-for-others" that is neither accessible to nor controlled by me; 2) the
Other has seized my being-for-others and turned it into an object of
possession. Sartre claims that it is this terrifying awareness that motivates
me to retaliate by turning the Other into a mere thing, a possession
existing at my disposal (I can treat it as a slimy hole, etc.). This is done via
the same mechanism: I look back at the look. This would not only make
me a subject once again (specifically a subject before the Other-turnedobject), but like any attempt at appropriation, it would also satisfy my
desire to found the being of an object/Other which, as seen earlier,
amounts to my desire to be God.
This description of appropriation through the look makes it clear that
Sartre is not at liberty to relegate the Other to the ontological status of ensoi. By his own admission, it is because the Other is a subject, a pour-soi,
who has initially turned me into an object that appropriation of the Other

13

LeDoeuff,p.51.

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41

becomes for me a desirable attitude. In it I attempt to deny the objectness which the Other has conferred upon me. As Sartre notes,
The Other is in no way given to us as an object. The objectivation
of the Other would be the collapse of...(her) being-as-a-look... (It) is a
defense on the part of my being which, precisely by conferring on the
Other a being-for-me, frees me from my being-for-the-Other. In the
phenomenon of the look, the Other is in principle that which can not
be an object.
14

And so even as I am trying to turn her into an object-for-me, Sartre says

that I nevertheless "experience the Other concretely as a free, conscious
subject." Even if woman is always and only the Other in Sartre's system,
she is nevertheless guaranteed the ontological status of pour-soi given
Sartre's theory of intersubjectlvity.
Furthermore, it is a theory in which the Other's consciousness is
guaranteed prior to my own consciousness. My consciousness emerges
only subsequent to the Other's consciousness: I am first an object before
the Other can be made into an object. And since I cannot be an object for
an inert thing but only to a consciousness, the Other, far from being an
inert object, must have already been a consciousness prior to my
awareness of her look.
This discussion clarifies the status of woman in Sartre's system, as it
also puts his sexism in perspective. Because of his blatantly sexist
language, we are apt to dismiss his philosophy as sexist, thinking that he is
just another Freud or Schopenhauer. And so it is that Collins and Pierce
began their article by comparing Sartre's psychoanalysis with Freudian
psychology, implying that the two theories are defective for the same
reason and to the same magnitude. However, this is not a fair comparison
because, unlike Freud, Sartre is bound by his own ontology to ascribe to
woman the same status he ascribed to man; namely, that of pour-soi.
Despite his personal distaste for woman, in his system there is nothing
missing in the woman which makes her a lesser being who is inferior to
man. Whereas the sexism he displayed in his psychoanalysis
undoubtedly reflects his character, it does not constitute an indispensible
part of his theory. Ultimately, this is what really matters in our final
evaluation of Sartrean philosophy. By clearing Sartre's ontology from any
infection from his personal misogyny, we can once again justify a vast
tradition offeministwritings, beginning with those of Simone de Beauvoir,
which have adopted Sartre's ontology of freedom as a philosophical
reference point.
16

14

Sartre, p. 268.
Ibid.,p.271.

1B